


Corner to Corner

by menocchio



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Boxing & Fisticuffs, M/M, Pre-Series, Pre-War, Reckless Young Hearts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-01-29 19:40:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21415582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/menocchio/pseuds/menocchio
Summary: One should always protect one's tender sides.
Relationships: Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons
Comments: 30
Kudos: 238





	1. Chapter 1

I.

Alfie can take the hits, always could. The trick is knowing where to take them, what can be exposed and sacrificed to keep the body going. Alfie's very good at keeping at going.

You don't know where to take the hits and you'll do your head in, end up like the boy he was fighting last week. Ten rounds Alfie is at his head and the silly twat instinctively protects his pert nose at the expense of the tender sides of his bone box. Eleventh round and the poor fuck can't quite get his toes up to the mark in the center of the ring. The din of the hall swells, the crowd howling and hectoring, loathe to let this prime example of good Anglo blood fall to the likes of a thick-fisted brawler from Camden Town. Inches from the mark the boy veers and stumbles and it's over; Alfie collects his winnings and a tall bottle of dark beer for the walk home. He's out the door with a whistle on his lips and a gun in his belt.

(Course, you gotta watch yourself walking alone in those civilized boroughs. Certain breeds don't like seeing their own lose, and they don't mind finishing the job their mate couldn't between the ropes.)

Prizefighting's easy winnings, but it's not something Alfie plans to keep doing for much longer. He's got plans, right, and while money deposited by blood on his fists is money just the same as what got by his head for numbers, he prefers the latter. And so for the remaining bouts he has left, he protects his tender sides.

One should always protect one's tender sides.

* * *

His next fight is a little farther afield from home than he likes to go, but his fixer Howard Cutter assures him the fight's secured by the Bessas and funded by some upstart Italians, and with the crowd they're expecting, the payout's gonna be twice what he made in the last month. They're selling it as a skirmish, a blood feud of ethnics – some deep pockets like putting money on that sort of thing, get a little exotic thrill at the sight of spilled heathen blood.

Alfie's stripped to the waist and waiting in his corner. He warms up a little, jumping and stretching but nothing ostentatious. He's alone, which is fine; he never much cared for having some useless well-wisher yelling at him from the sides, telling him the what-for and what's-up as he puts in all the sweat and effort. No, Alfie don't need anyone in his corner.

His opponent's about his age, maybe a little younger. Not much to look at in terms of bulk, which means he's probably meaner than an alley cat been yanked out mid-coitus. Probably grew up punching bags of coal when he wasn't wrestling wild dogs along the canals. The boy at his corner is even smaller, but he looks quick and sure like he knows all the soft spots. His eyes are constantly moving along the room, alert and watchful.

Alfie pauses mid-stretch and leans back against the ropes.

Gypsy, that's what Cutter told him, a Peaky boy from Birmingham. Name's Arthur Shelby, and Alfie would wager his winnings the one beside him is another Shelby, a younger brother or cousin perhaps.

The younger Peaky hooks his arms over the top rope and grasps Arthur's narrow shoulders, his head dipping down so he can murmur something into his ear. Alfie watches the unheard words shape his mouth and feels a stirring of air along his own cheek, a phantom missive.

The boy must sense something like a second shadow on the ground because he looks up. His eyes cut over like he's always known where Alfie was, sharp as the blade that's probably hidden in his cap.

Alfie meets his gaze and doesn't bother to pretend he wasn't staring. He lets his mouth curl into a small, rueful smile, and the boy's stream of whispers falter and stop.

(Arthur, eyes on the dirt, keeps nodding along anyway, nerves firing along his neck seconds after the animating wire's been severed.)

His fixer told him to take the fight fifteen rounds. Alfie turns from those narrowed, wary eyes and decides he's going to knock that pretty boy's brother out cold in the first.

  
  


II.

Tommy used to think he could live forever gliding along on one of Uncle Charlie's boats. The world of men that sat on the banks was a mystery he was content to let float by: approaching with great potential and receding back into the fog before the sight grew tiresome. On the water he and his brothers were untouchable.

As he gets older he finds himself longing for an unknown destination, a solid place to step off the boat and stake a claim.

“It was a fucking sucker punch, John,” Arthur says thickly, words issuing from the side of his mouth that isn't covered by a steak. He is reclining a few feet away in the open air, his head back against the side of the boat and eyes slitted furiously up at the sky.

John smirks and kicks Arthur's shin, hard enough to make the other wince. “Wish I coulda seen it. Not fair that I have to stay back with the boats when we go to London.” This last he directs to Charlie, who ignores him and continues steering. John returns his attention to his brother. “Was this fighter big, then?”

“Twice my size, John Boy. And still had to take me down like a cheating dog.”

The fighter hadn't been that much bigger than Arthur – shorter but more solid. He felt bigger than he looked, Tommy thinks. Which makes no sense but is true nonetheless.

John slouches down and tugs at his cap, yawning for show. He is already growing bored with the story. “Guess that's the end of your boxing career,” he says slyly. “First fight in London and you have to row home, tail between your legs.”

Arthur snatches off the steak and straightens, mouth screwed up in outrage. In the early morning light the bruise decorating half his face is gruesome. John tenses, spoiling for a fight; Charlie frowns, looking past them to Tommy, who sighs and ducks out from under the canopy.

Last time Arthur and John got into it on the boat, they nearly capsized.

“You're thinking too short-term, John,” he says, leaning in between the two of them. “You have to take the long view, think of the narrative we're building.”

Arthur nods along, anticipating the angle that will salvage some of his pride.

Tommy continues, “We underestimated our opponent. Arthur's gone from being the unbeaten fury of Birmingham to underdog. Next time he goes to London, he'll be trained up and prepared, and we'll get twice the return on our wagers when he wins.”

It sounds plausible, anyway. Even Charlie looks a little considering.

“Just the one problem there, Tom,” John says eventually. He leans back and props his elbows against the side of the boat.

Tommy sighs and digs in his pocket for his cigarettes. “Yeah, and what's that?”

“We lost all the money we came with.” John spreads his hands and looks around at them all. “No way anyone's letting us go back to London to try again any time soon.”

As facts go, that one is pretty inarguable. Tommy cups his cigarette and lights it to cover his grimace. Arthur collapses back in his seat and slaps the steak back on his face.

The boat cuts inexorably on towards Birmingham, and the hiding they're all going to get from Aunt Polly.

  
  


III.

With his winnings and the modest surplus from a couple small schemes on the side, Alfie can afford to live alone. In the space where once his mother and another boarder would stand and cook and wash, he builds a collection of trivialities: trinkets from the Spitalfields market; paintings from artists lingering outside opium dens and looking to sell quick for their next hit; books from the old man on Brick Street who'd come from Poland carrying only two trunks of leather-bound volumes wrapped in linen coated with boiled linseed oil and umber.

Alfie arrays his treasures around him in consideration of the light from the window. Eventually he realizes he'll need to build some shelves.

He lives in a room at the top of a divided terraced house on Wentworth Street, where he can be among his people if never of them. A family of seven lives in the room below his and all but the littlest two get work on the periphery of the rag trade. The stairwell frequently reeks of dye, and some nights coming home after a match he gets dizzy with it; his head pounds and his overworked lungs spasm, but then he'll rise above the stink and ascend into his own quiet space.

He doesn't mind the arrangement too much; sanctuary always demands a price.

Night of his next match he locks up his room and takes the stairs down two at a time. The rapid rhythm of his tread is as good as a factory whistle, and the door of the dye family flies open as he comes even with it. A tousled dark head pokes out and orients itself towards him expectantly.

“Alfie,” says the boy in greeting.

“Young Sir Edmund,” says Alfie in return, pausing on the step and angling a significant look back upwards towards his own door. His hand dips into his pocket for a coin. “Think you can pencil in some door-watching into your evening itinerary?”

“Leo and Ollie both got fevers, so Mum's making me stay home with them.” Edmund's hand extends out.

But Alfie withholds. “_I_'m not paying you to stay home with them.”

“I can look after them and the door at the same time,” the boy protests. And then, cunningly, he adds, “Who else you gonna get to do it?”

Barely ten and already an observer of market demand; Edmund's going to go far in life. Alfie drops the coin in his outstretched hand.

* * *

Cutter's cross with him about the last fight, keeps on about trust and the bottom line of all the poor barmen who were expecting a night's worth of fight-driven thirst and instead got two swings and a knockout. All told in the end, Alfie's let down not just his fixer, but half of London.

“There was a voice whispering in my ear,” says Alfie, conversational as he laces up his boots. “The type of holy command you cannot deny for love nor money, and it told me _Alfie, you better knock that little Brummie bugger out before he makes off with all the gold in the room, as his nature demands._"

He gets cuffed around the head for that.

“Feuds are for marketing,” Cutter says. “They don't belong in business. You're just lucky the man wasn't local and had no connections who gave a damn about the humiliation.”

He thinks about the boy who'd stood shouting from the corner, how he'd leaped in one liquid motion over the ropes and landed by his fallen brother's side without noticing the impact on his knees; how he'd grasped the still face in both hands and tilted it from side to side; how he'd raked his eyes up from that face to Alfie's in one dark searing trail.

Alfie hides his smirk in his shoulder and draws his bootlaces tight.

“Alfie, do you hear me?”

He straightens up. “Howard, you used to possess a sense of humor. Wherever did it go?”

Cutter scowled. “I sacrificed it the day I signed you. Worst trade in a long line of bad ones.”

“Ah, well, at least you still have your sweet disposition.”

They start for the door that leads to the makeshift ring set up outside. Alfie's fighting in a market today, where the blood will mix with the air and the shouts of the crowd will reach for a Heaven that sits empty.

He never pays much attention to the people who attend these things, figuring one man getting excited at another's thumping is much like any other. Their jeering's not unlike the lads who used to circle around and kick Alfie in the streets, except now their money's going into his pocket and every one of them knows Alfie could beat him bloody under a minute. There's a satisfaction in that, somewhere.

He abides by Cutter's forbidding stare and dances nice with his opponent, a man a little older than him with a wicked scar twisting shiny over one cheek. The man's a little slower but he's heavy, and his fists land with weight of age and judgment.

By the fourth round, Alfie's taken a few punches. He pours some rum into the little tin cup set beside his corner and drinks it down in one go. His eyes drift over the wash of faces standing around, and out of the line of contorted expressions he finds one observing cool and unmoved.

Alfie lowers the cup and only then finds out his mouth is bleeding as it pulls and stings around his smile.

  
  


IV.

There is something wrong with Tommy.

He has always known it, can't pretend he doesn't hear the voice that sits behind his eyes watching the world and making its plans. It weighs strengths and weaknesses and only considers emotions when they're a liability likely to tip over into inconvenience. He doesn't always _like_ these plans, but the voice is merciless. It doesn't give a damn what he feels, only what he can accomplish.

It's only ever for the good of the family in the long run, but he knows they wouldn't see it that way if they got wind of what he was doing. And Tommy doesn't like explaining himself. It takes too long.

This is the third time he's traveled down this way; it's getting easier to slip out of Small Heath, to leave behind the coal-clogged streets and move past the delicate bubble of his family's influence. Outside, he stands alone and it's strangely exciting.

In London Tommy keeps his cap low over his eyes and tries to shrink in on himself so as to look inconspicuous. It goes against the Shelby nature – make some noise! Throw your arms out and walk down the road like you own it because some day you will.

In the end, he doesn't know how successful he is at blending in, but thankfully no one's interested in the audience when a prizefight's going down. So he forgets himself, forgets he can be seen at all. With each new bout, he drifts closer to the ring, until he edges up to the spray of blood along the floor. A wall of noise rises at his back and before him, a vigorous face angling down from the ropes.

Again that strange bolt of recognition and connection, undeniable.

He is no longer the one seeking, but now also being sought. The voice that sits behind his eyes finds that strangely exciting too.

* * *

His mother believed in lines of connection that spun throughout the world, gossamer-thin and imperceptible to the untrained eye. Tommy slips up sometimes when he's not guarding against it and imagines he can see them too. If he's drunk enough, he might follow the lines and find himself in a far meadow at dawn, facing down a preternaturally calm doe with an open blade in his hand and a decision before him.

In London after the fight, his eyesight turns queer with drink. Objects in his path sharpen to painful definition while faces blur into watercolor impressions, streaking along the periphery as he weaves down the street. He enters an unfamiliar establishment with a step made certain by superstition, and his faith is rewarded with the sight of Alfie Solomons leaning up against the bar.

Tommy had a schoolteacher once who told him, in the tone of one bestowing a compliment, that he didn't _look gypsy_. At the time, the idea that strangers' eyes might slide over him and not register his fundamental difference left him feeling obscurely unsettled. But he's willing to use it now.

He relaxes his shoulders, tucks in his elbows. Keeps his gaze half-lidded and dull, just a young chap in his cups on this gay Thursday evening.

Solomons reads through it in an instant, is the thing. He notices Tommy approaching. His eyes flick up and down and his mouth lifts mockingly. He doesn't move or turn from the bar. He gives the impression he is waiting for something.

Something is tickling his nerves. The room around them is unremarkable, neither full nor empty and its occupants perfectly preoccupied with their conversations and drinks. No one seems to notice Alfie Solomons and maybe this is what unsettles Tommy. Men don't ignore something dangerous unless it's part of an act, a trap.

Tommy glances around the room once more and drops the act. When he looks back at the other man, the smile has grown. It should look warped by the bruise at his jaw, but it's like it's too powerful or something. Smile beats bruise in an easy knockout.

And Tommy wants to stare; he has never seen a mouth like that on a man. He fixes his attention on his dark, alert eyes instead.

“Thomas Shelby,” Solomons says then, dropping the name into the air like it's a line in a vaudeville show and any second the dancers are about to start to shimmy. “You're becoming a fixture in the neighborhood. Why is that?”

Solomons keeps him pinned with an attentive look and reaches unseeing over the counter to grab a second heavy-bottomed glass. He proceeds to fill it alongside his own – he has been given free reign with a bottle of rum, which sits half empty at his elbow.

Lacking recourse and looking to hide his surprise, Tommy accepts the glass.

“Well?”

“You know my name,” he comments, and takes a slow sip from the drink in his hand. The liquor is acrid and tastes of nothing but London, an injection of exotic sweetness tempered by the heaviness around it. Tommy doesn't like it. He takes another drink and glances up.

The man's thick eyebrows rise. He rolls forward onto his forearms against the bar, and ducks his head slightly, one large hand coming up to ponderously rub at the shorn hair at the nape of his neck. Tommy looks at the strong lines that come together to make his neck and shoulders.

When Solomons speaks again, the words come out thick and muttered, but they lose the stiffness in their joints within a couple sentences.

“Yeah, well. Asked around about the Brummie boys from a few weeks ago, and a mate of my fixer knew a man been recently released from prison. Paroled on his twelve year sentence – he'd been thrown away for fucking his landlord's sheep, claimed it was only his ancient right, for those sheep were raised and pastured on lands that had once belonged to the commons, see, and the lord's family had stolen it over generations with their bloody fences.”

Here, Solomons sniffed and dropped the hand that had been moving hypnotically over his head. He cracked his neck and angled a friendly look up at Tommy, all the while continuing relentlessly:

“This sheep buggerer spoke in the telltale yodel of one hailing from the Black Country, and seeing as he felt so particular and passionate about keeping the common law alive, my fixer's mate thought he might have some local knowledge. And damned if he wasn't a card-carrying member of the Birmingham Communist Party, of which you are apparently a member yourself. And so, through a spark of luck and not a little determination on behalf of my fixer's mate, it was swiftly concluded that he did indeed know of the Shelbys, and their eldest two boys. They say we live in new, modern times, but when it comes down to it, it's still all gossip and fucking, ain't it? And I call that,” he concludes with satisfaction, straightening up from his slouch with a strong arch of his back, “the fundamental nature of civilization.”

Thus having delivered this winding tale, he watches Tommy. Expectant again.

Tommy doesn't blink. His fingers itch for a cigarette, but he knows any move for his case will be read wrong. After a moment he settles for finishing off his drink. He chooses, for the sake of his own sanity, not to notice the way Solomons blatantly follows the movement of his throat.

Why did Tommy come here – this bar, the fight, London? He thought he understood the instinct he'd been following, but he is beginning to realize –

He thinks he might –

He sets the glass back down on the counter and says, “So you say you were asking about me.”

The smile returns. There's something vaguely menacing about it, decides Tommy. His limbs are buzzing, reacting to something stronger than the rum.

“That's what I said, yeah,” says Solomons. He licks his lips, tonguing at the cut on his lower lip, and it is only due to the slowness and deliberation of the action that Tommy realizes he's been caught staring after all. The smile turns to a smirk, and Solomons turns away.

He pinches up a cork from the bar between two blunt fingers and neatly slaps it home into his bottle, which he hefts into his crooked elbow like one might cradle a baby. His free hand reaches out and retrieves a half-smoked cigar from an ashtray on the bar. He sets his lips around it, the plump pink puckering in rounds, _pa-pa-pa. _The cigar kindles to the air.

And then, easy as you please he says to Tommy – like this is something men say to other men, he says:

“If your dainty balls are still needing a good squeeze, come along.”

He brushes past his shoulder like a stiff breeze, leaving Tommy ruffled and reeling.

Tommy stares in the space he'd just occupied. He feels too leery to look around, knowing the glance might be a tell to the other men in the room. Not that their behavior hasn't been a pretty good fucking tell as it is, you'd only have to watch for a few seconds.

Tommy decides not to worry about it, which is merely a matter of matching his insides to his outsides. The first step to not caring is looking like you don't. It's something his father excelled at; his mother, not so much.

He turns from the bar, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes. In the stretch of light spilling out into the street, he sees Solomons has paused to wait for him. The sight makes Tommy give in, for just a moment, to a shiver.

He is following something he doesn't properly understand, something long hidden within himself. Maybe he always suspected it existed. Maybe he's been looking for its denial.

But when he steps out into the night air and meets the waiting man's eyes, he doesn't see denial anywhere in reach.

  
  


V.

God draws down his fly and takes a piss on the walk back to Alfie's place. Water collects in the usual places, runs off and mixes with the muck of the day's travels. The gutters so begrudgingly installed by the neighborhood's landlords overflow at the low corners and tip their contents onto the ground below in a deafening splatter. Everything is leaking something.

Alfie shrugs his jacket off and stretches it over his head. Tommy flips his collar and hunches forward like he's taken a jab to the gut. In unspoken agreement, they run, skidding beside one another over the wet pavers.

Confidence being his lifelong patron, Alfie takes a corner too sharp and his feet shoot out from beneath him. Only a mad grab for a street post saves his behind. Next to him, Tommy laughs – a quiet, disbelieving gasp of a sound. Alfie's so immediately taken with it, he can't even feel embarrassed. But he also can't let it stand without reprisal, and so he shoves the unsuspecting boy sideways into a puddle.

The laughter dies out but the humor lingers. They continue on.

By the time they find their refuge out of the rain, their shoes are flooded past saving. The smell of wet wool and leather quickly clouds out the building's foyer, its delightful normal collection of co-mingled odors temporarily overwhelmed.

They don't speak as they start up the stairs. Tommy's skin shines slick in the passing light at each landing, and Alfie wants nothing more than to put his mouth on it. But he has learned to be a patient man.

He pays close attention as he lets them into his flat. He's always careful with the placement of any new acquisition, wanting it to fit properly with the ever-changing mosaic in his head. He cocks his head, eyes the way Tommy's profile cuts through the dim light, and can't help making a thoughtful sound.

He has a feeling Tommy Shelby would fit anywhere in his room.

He leaves him by the door and goes to light a lamp. The cluttered walls reveal themselves in the bloom of light, and he feels something inside him relax. It's always good, being back in his own space.

“It's not so different,” says Tommy. He turns in place to study the walls. But he don't sound like he's talking about the walls.

Alfie glances over. “What's that, then?”

“This place. Your building. Some of the men back home talk like London's paved with marble cobblestones. An electric light in every hearth, that sort of thing. But this is just like home.” He meets Alfie's eyes, a peculiar tension to his jaw, something that's shaped like a smile but with a mean slant. “Fifteen families in five flats. Terrace courts packed in tight so the light don't hardly make it down to the street. Tell me, Solomons, you have your own plumbing or do you have to share?”

His faces warms beneath the glaze of cold rainwater.

“Never had to sweet talk your way into someone's bed before, I take it.” He doesn't know whether to laugh or spit. “Must be the face.”

Tommy doesn't respond, but his lids fall, concealing his expression. Annoyance or embarrassment. Well, he's not alone there.

Alfie turns away and goes rifling for two cups in which to pour the remainder of his bottle. Over his shoulder, he says, “Call me Solomons again, and you're out on the street. Won't have someone barking at me like a schoolteacher in me own rooms.”

Truth is, Alfie's smarting a little. To have some upstart in here, judging his home and feeling free to broadcast it. The fucking cheek. He didn't even look at the painting on the south wall.

The sting of the disrespect mixes with the unfamiliar nerves he's been ignoring for a couple hours, and it all briefly overwhelms the simmering arousal. He looks at Tommy, standing easy inside his home and blinking sleepily at all his eyes rest upon, and he finds himself saying:

“Get out.”

Tommy looks over, expression half-amused. “What?”

Alfie nods. “Out, this is over. C'mon, move those little legs.” He crosses to the door and opens it, nodding to the dark hall outside.

Tommy doesn't move for a second, disbelief and affront progressing across his face. Alfie, heat still flushing through his body, wonders if he'll have to get a hand on him to throw him out. But Tommy slowly moves for the door.

He hesitates only a moment before crossing back out of the apartment, and he stops just outside. Alfie shuts the door before he can turn around. He waits, listening for the tell-tale creak of the floorboards outside.

The wood creaks; Alfie nods to himself and and crosses the room to toast his decision.

The rum tastes weak and watery, the flavor lacking some of its former verve. Dissatisfied but his mind and body still abuzz, he fetches about for something to do and ends up in his armchair. The book he started the day before rests spine up on the chair arm. Alfie takes a large dram of his drink and looks at it.

Five seconds later he is up again and pacing towards the door.

Tommy is sitting on the top step, cap crumpled in his fists between his bent knees and face turned down. His head snaps up at the abrupt opening of the door, his bewilderment swiftly transforming, eyes widening. He stands and reaches out and they meet in the middle, a collision of grasping hands and seeking lips.

Alfie hauls him inside and kicks the door shut.

* * *

He expects a fight, insofar as he expects anything. Even with the rare sort of man who is inclined to fuck other men out of desire rather than a twisted exercise of power, it is still usually a fight of sorts. And Alfie usually loves it – he's got thick knuckles and coarsened skin from his bouts in the ring; his hands know how to grip and hold.

But Tommy ducks and weaves easily past all his expectations. He pulls at Alfie's braces and shirt with an air of brimming discovery. His lips are softer than any he's ever had, his kisses impossibly sweet for a lad Alfie's sure has blinded more than one man with the blade hidden in his cap.

Alfie bends and presses and instead of straining, Tommy flows with him like water. His body is slender but well-proportioned, stronger than it looks. And Alfie has looked.

Alfie wants to strip him bare and stand back to admire. He wants to see him arranged across his bed, in his chair, up against the window in the morning, when the bright light will frame him in a perfect portrait. But he suspects still life cannot compete with the boy in motion.

When Alfie puts him down on his bed and covers his body with his own, Tommy's face flickers with surprise. But still he goes with it. His legs, at least, seem to know what to do – arranging themselves around Alfie hips and holding on. His lips dent thoughtfully, like he's assessing the position and its merits. Alfie bypasses all calculation and kisses the expression away.

In the days that follow, he's going to remember flashes of this at inopportune moments – the splayed slap of Tommy's fingers against the wall, the gleaming line of his neck as he throws his head back. His ragged breathing as he blinks down with a dazed fervency at Alfie's cock driving between his clenched thighs.

His damn eyes. He doesn't stop watching Alfie once through any of it, and it's not until Alfie puts him on his belly that he gets some reprieve from that heavy gaze.


	2. Chapter 2

I.

“Make yourself useful,” says Polly and hands him Finn, whose face is still red and splotchy from crying. “Ada doesn't get off work until seven, and I need some peace.”

Tommy grunts as he takes his weight. “You know, he probably wouldn't throw so many tantrums if you and Arthur stopped spoiling him. Carrying him everywhere like this.” But even as he speaks, his arms settle under the boy, adjusting and making space for him.

“Yeah, he's got two legs, don't he?” put in John, reaching past Tommy to snatch a biscuit off the table. He is not an ideal ally for this discussion; he clearly doesn't remember the year Arthur carried him everywhere between shifts as a factory floor scavenger, and Polly's got a sharp memory for hypocrisy.

Tommy tries to communicate to her the thought with his eyes: do you want Finn to turn out like John? Do you?

Polly ignores him. She sticks a freshly rolled cigarette in her mouth. She lights it, blows smoke, and orders them out of the flat.

They begin to protest, but she cuts them short. “If I don't get an afternoon to myself, I'm going to disappear into the wood and never come back. Go – take your brothers and get out.”

Aunt Polly is twenty-six years old and tired. She lost her husband, and then her two kids, and less than a year later her brother dropped his own on her, either confident she would care for them or not giving a damn either way. Sometimes Tommy looks back on the past two years and feels faintly stunned they all made it through in one piece. When she threatens to leave, he takes it very seriously. She may love them as kin, but love can feel very distant when you're tired, really tired. She's too stubborn to actually leave, but he doesn't want to watch her break.

“Yeah, all right, Pol,” he says, easy, and turns for the door.

“Do you think she'd really disappear into the wood?” asks John as they troop outside. He sounds more curious than worried, but then John never sounds worried about anything.

Outside is a chill damp overlaid with smog. The street is cratered in the middle about fifty yards down from their flat, and the hole has filled with a brackish pool of water that glints like an oil spill. Two children a few years older than Finn are slapping at it with their hands, trying to splash one another.

“No,” says Tommy, distracted. Finn is staring back over his shoulder with wide eyes, and he's worried the boy's going to start squalling for his aunt in the middle of the street. His mouth being an inch from Tommy's ear, he feels strongly about preventing this.

“You sure? Dad did.”

“Dad didn't disappear into the wood, he took a packet to Dublin.” Or so they heard from a cousin who worked the docks at Liverpool. “Anyway, Polly wouldn't leave us like that.”

Despite his private doubts, it doesn't feel like a lie. Their mum and dad had always been one foot out the door, each in their own way. That preemptive distance resolved itself into a feeling – a feeling he's never got from Polly. Even when she's angry with them, there's an intimacy to it; no one gets that mad unless they care.

John circles the two of them and swoops in close to squint interrogatively at Finn. “Do you really think he's gonna be spoiled because he gets carried everywhere?”

“I'm not sure,” Tommy says, peering into Finn's face. He doesn't know if he imagines the glimmer of triumph in those slow-blinking eyes. Surely not. He hefts the boy and shifts him to the other elbow; Finn's arms come up to circle his neck.

Tommy says to his brothers, “Let's go see what Arthur's up to, hm?”

* * *

Soon as he steps into the gym, it's coming back at him. The dull sound of fists making contact with softer flesh, the grunts and hard breathing. Tommy's never before had an association with violence other than avoidance, and he finds his body's new reaction to it curious.

He sets Finn on the ground and murmurs in his ear, “See if you can find Arthur, now, and mind you don't stick your hands in the pens.”

Finn runs straight down the center of the gym with all the wavering velocity and unsteady steps of one new to walking but determined to take full advantage of this new trick. Tommy and John, with their superior vantage point, spot Arthur immediately and take a more leisurely approach.

“So you over your weird thing about the boxing?” John asks him.

He cuts his eyes over. “What do you mean?”

“You've been avoiding Arthur's practice bouts. Everybody's noticed,” he adds, heedless of the corollary: everyone noticed but no one else dared say anything.

“Is that so,” Tommy says, and nothing more.

As they arrive at Arthur's ring, John seems to realize that's all the response he's going to get, and he rolls his eyes. He mutters, “When'd you get so bloody mysterious?”

John bends down to pick Finn up and set him on the pylon in the corner, and Finn cheers at being restored to a proper height. Watching, Tommy gives it five minutes before he's going to have to intervene and rescue the boy.

“John, Finn,” Arthur shouts from the other side of the ring. His eyes travel past them and find Tommy, and his eyebrows jump. “And Tom! All my little brothers come to watch me train, eh?”

Tommy thinks uneasily that John might have been on to something; he has spent too much time away. People have noticed.

It's only been five days since he slipped out of the flat on Wentworth Street in London, his sore body throbbing, his heart already giving beat to a dirge of strange longing as he crossed the city in the slow dawn traffic. Working men took one look at his swollen mouth and sleepless eyes and smirked at him as he passed. They wouldn't have smirked if they knew the provenance of the ravishment; Tommy has never felt so exposed or so invisible.

Most of the marks have now faded from his body, and those that haven't he keeps safely concealed from his family. He imagines the hand print bruise high up on his wrist throbs now as his brothers look over at him expectantly.

“Been a while, Tommy,” says Arthur. His hair is tumbling forward over his forehead, and his chest is shining with sweat; he has been training hard. He dips a cup into the pitcher of water in the corner, flicks a few droplets at Finn just to get him to giggle, and takes a long drink. Over the cup rim, his eyes question Tommy's.

Tommy breaks his gaze, but only to reach for his cigarettes. He takes his time acquiring one and lighting it. Then he says, “I've been gathering intelligence.”

“Yeah?” says Arthur.

Standing over by Finn, balancing the boy with one hand, John looks up at Tommy and smirks skeptically.

“Solomons is a patient fighter, generally,” he says, voice overcompensating and landing on cold, “but he's also impulsive. You'll want to learn how to provoke him.”

Tommy focuses on the taste of his cigarette. He brings the smoke inside himself, imagines it attaching itself to the silly sentiment lingering in his chest. Exhales it all back into the world, in a cloud that quickly dissipates as all temporary things must.

  
  


II.

Alfie's used to being watched. On Wentworth Street and in nearby markets, it's because he's that boy from the bad family. In the pubs he's got a reputation as a bruiser; in the ring he is a bruiser. He gets looks because of his hat, his mouth, his swagger. Some days he feels like the only one not looking at little ole Alfred Solomons Jr is God hisself, and even there Alfie's not counting it, because he's got _plans_. Before he's through, he expects he'll earn his share of attention from that direction.

The next few weeks are different than usual – he feels the attention but never spies the eyes that do the looking. He glances up from his broadsheet on the street and can almost feel the movement of displaced air from where his stalker should be standing. He looks out over the crowd at his latest fight and finds no hooded eyes looking back, but then the hallway leading to the backroom where he warms up and cools down will smell of cigarette tobacco.

He's never heard of someone playing coy after the fucking's already been done.

He don't know whether to feel irritation or a re-entrenchment of desire, and he suspects this ambivalence is going to become very familiar, the longer he is acquainted with Tommy Shelby.

One afternoon he spends several hours over in Camden Town, touring warehouse space and dickering with the present owner over his extortionary rates. He's in a foul mood as he arrives home, and then young Sir Edmund pokes his curly little head out onto the stairwell and whispers:

“Someone came by.”

Alfie pauses on the landing and looks up the remaining stairs to his own darkened step. He asks the boy, “Did you recognize who?”

Edmund pulls a face. “Wouldn't I've said if I did, instead of saying _somebody_?” His tone mightily injured, like no one in the whole wide world appreciated his concision and accuracy.

Alfie flicks his ear. “Don't get cheeky. They still up there?”

Cupping his ear, the boy nods.

“How long, hey?”

“'Bout half an hour.”

Alfie slips a coin into his palm and says, “Good lad.” He starts up his stairs, one hand slipping to the handle of his pistol, but a furious hissing of his name from below forces him to pause and look back.

Edmund has crept out of the flat and dared step on the next stair. He whisper-shouts, “Remember not to shoot towards the floor this time. You promised Mum.”

Alfie impatiently waves him off and continues his ascent.

No light shows through the crack at the bottom of the door, but of course he would've noticed from the street if there'd been a lamp on inside. His infiltrator is more careful than that. And half an hour's too long for a straightforward burgle, which means the mission here is perhaps more sinister in nature.

He cocks his pistol and opens the door. Quiet inside. He check sight lines on either side of the door and, seeing no one, slips fully inside. He pauses, listening.

Nothing. Perhaps Edmund was mistaken? No, Alfie's definitely feeling something amiss.

Pistol still raised, he crosses the room with a whispering tread and steps up to the entryway of his bedroom.

“I should shoot you,” he says.

Tommy gives him a deeply skeptical look from where he is sitting against the headboard of the bed. “All the bragging you did about these sheets last time I was here? I think not.”

“Could always buy new sheets.” As he talks, his eyes rove around the room, taking in everything; Tommy's flung a small mountain of wool over the chair in the corner – his coat, hat, jacket, and waistcoat. The boy is in shirtsleeves. Even his shoes have been neatly set aside. “Listen, I understand you come from a tent and caravan people, and that perhaps you are unaccustomed to the ways of settled folk, but generally a man doesn't go about breaking through another man's door, not unless he's looking for a swift exit from this earth, mate.”

Tommy looks nonplussed. “Your door was unlocked.”

Alfie lets the pistol drop. “This here's a community, Tommy. We trust one another. I suppose in Birmingham one has to routinely take the hand of the neighbor's whelp to discourage thievery?”

“I heard the conversation with the boy,” he says as if Alfie hadn't spoken. “Who'd you shoot last time?”

He tosses the pistol aside. Tommy doesn't move a muscle, but watches with interest as Alfie sits on the edge of the bed to start undoing the laces of his boots.

Thump, thump, boots are off.

“Well?” Tommy asks, persistent, “Who'd you shoot last time?”

“It was a peacock,” says Alfie and lunges up the bed at him.

He feels a puff of breath against his face – Tommy laughing as they roll, and he kisses the sound back into him, gives himself over to that mouth again. When he leans away, Tommy is already looking rumpled and right, his fine dark hair tossed against the pillows, his collar pulled loose around that wanton gulping neck.

Alfie presses his thumb idly into the dip in his throat and strokes. He's got Tommy pinned at the hips and is hoping the boy will soon register the hold and try to buck it. He's got ways of encouraging such a response, if it comes to that.

“So you came back,” he says.

Tommy's eyelids fall to half-mast. “I got the impression I would not be unwelcome.”

“Mm, oh indeed?” Alfie ducks his head and nuzzles his neck, feeling the boy shiver beneath him. He's more tense than he wants to let on. Nervous? Alfie knows ways to relax him. “You been watching me. At my fights and the like.”

“Never get tired of watching you, Alfie.”

Said in a sweet, coaxing tone, Alfie might've been suspicious he was being had – that this were some bizarre kind of entrapment, and any minute a pack of Peaky boys was gonna come busting in through his door. But Tommy says it affectless, perhaps even a little bemused. Like he was also feeling every inch of this strange thing between them that Alfie was.

(Alfie's hand has already drifted down to check; yes, whole lot of inches there between them.)

Some uncomfortable emotion is starting to creep into Tommy's eyes: doubt? Alfie's been a poor host this evening. He should rectify that.

Alfie hitches a knee up and rolls his hips, grinning at the cut-off noise he makes. He tells him, “Next time, no need to stop at the shirt and trousers on my account. The paintings won't be scandalized by nudity.”

“Next time?” says Tommy, a little breathless.

“You strike me as a lad who has his moves planned out several stages in advance.” Alfie kisses him, long and hard, and murmurs definitively, “Yeah, next time.”

  
  


III.

He awakens to a hand low on his stomach and a room full of light.

Blinking through the remnants of his sleep fog, Tommy turns his head on the pillow and looks at Alfie, who is sitting up against the headboard and reading a newspaper. He is shirtless and without socks, as if he'd wandered outside only long enough to pick up the broadsheet before beating a hasty retreat. He's not pretending with the paper, but quite seriously intent upon it; the hand is the absent extremity, mindlessly stroking his skin the way one does when one likes the warmth and texture and hasn't thought much past the feeling of it.

He shuts his eyes again and focuses on the hand.

Tommy's body woke to his touch as if to a shout. It's all still so new but already he feels expectant rather than surprised. He wonders how long Alfie has been like this, how many other men he has done this with. He is so casual about it.

He keeps his eyes closed and reaches up, testing, to cover Alfie's hand with his own. Callus brushing callus, the differences in their hard lives making alignment something to be worked for.

Unwillingly, his mouth curls in a mocking smile. What the hell is he even thinking about?

“I know what you're thinking about,” says Alfie, in another display of his strange telepathy Tommy's starting to get used to.

Tommy looks at him again, and this time Alfie's found something more interesting to read than the paper.

“Enlighten me,” he says. He switches his grip on the hand, fingers skating over the strong range of knuckles. Healed over, his mind automatically catalogs; he'll be entering another fight soon.

He begins to shift, but Alfie presses down, keeping him pinned to the bed. He tosses the paper to the floor and leans over him.

His hand journeys south and Tommy strains up to meet it, but Alfie claps his hips into a firm hold and flips him neatly, like he might a sack of flour. He stretches out above him, the heavy press of his cock rubbing the rough closure of his trousers against Tommy's bare skin. Tommy's mouth opens hot against the weave of the pillowcase. He lets out a noise he doesn't recognize.

Alfie's mouth lowers to his ear and it's a mark of how truly gone Tommy is that he doesn't even mind the sour breath ghosting across his face as he says:

“You're thinking, why am I not getting fucked already?”

And Tommy's disoriented and pushing up onto his knees, his body stumbling wrong-footed at its conflicting desires – his cock, still untouched, strains against gravity while the rest of him can only focus on Alfie's weight and how badly he suddenly needs it.

“Well, why aren't I?” he asks roughly.

But Alfie has become distracted. “Why... what?” His hands rove over his body, his rough fingers gripping the thickness of Tommy's thigh and questing higher.

Tommy's strung tight and vibrating like a live wire. He can't get the air in to repeat the question. But no matter: Alfie hasn't lost sight of the point.

Sex has always been a relief, a better drug than alcohol or cocaine. He thought he knew what he liked, the borders of his own pleasure, but Alfie's fingers push him off the map and into the blank white space of the unknown.

Part of him wants to fight it and tries shoving away, but it comes out only in a desperate jittery shake that leads no where. The impulse loses entirely to the one that has him widening the set of his knees and tensing his thighs. Bracing, displaying. Demanding.

His back curves and his head falls forward. He can no longer see where he is going and it doesn't matter because Alfie's beautiful cut cock is slicked up and pressing in.

For a moment Tommy is sure he has left his body behind entirely.

* * *

He awakens again to the slight chill of a misaligned blanket. The light in the room is closer and warmer; Alfie has turned the lamps on. The winter sun outside is already slipping away.

He cracks a yawn into his elbow and stretches. The muscles on the inside of his legs protest and when he rolls over he feels a soft ache of unfamiliar provenance. He reaches beneath the sheets and cautiously prods the area. It's hot and tender, the ring of muscle still damp from the fuck.

Alfie reenters the room and stops. He cocks his head and says, “Think you can hold that position? I know a man two blocks away who does portraits in exchange for opium coin.”

Tommy gives him a look and ease his hand away. His face is warm despite the coolness of the room.

Speaking of – he eyes the fresh sheen of sweat on the other man's chest and asks, “What've you been doing?”

“As you took your little princess nap? I'm training.” Alfie turns from the bed and takes hold of a skipping rope slung over a side table. “I have another fight in three days.”

One door in Tommy's mind closes and another opens. The other side is airless and waiting.

“Who are you fighting this time?” he asks lightly, sitting up and emerging from the pile of wrecked sheets. When Alfie glances over, Tommy scratches at his mussed hair like he is any other young man just woken up from a midday sex nap. He continues, “Let me guess. An eager young sportsman who has come to London seeking his fame and fortune and plans to bet it all on his fight with the notorious Alfie Solomons.”

Alfie casts him an amused look and begins skipping rope. He says, perfectly in-breath, “That's me, ruiner of dreams. Guess this eager young sportsman will just have to fuck off back home with his tail between his legs, and take over running his da's shop.”

Tommy makes an interested noise and props his chin in his hand. “His father owns a shop?”

Alfie pulls a face. “Of course. Only the desperate and the foolish start this life and expect to build something with it, but only the foolish call themselves a _sportsman_. Clearly this boy is a useless middle class todger who needs some sense beaten into him before it's too late.”

“So really, you might say you're doing him a favor,” suggests Tommy.

“Glad you see it my way.”

He is supposed to be watching Alfie's form for some hesitation or other weakness, but it's hard to look for something just not there. The only result of his study seems to be his dick twitching against his thigh.

He stands and starts searching for his clothes. The rapid thip-thip-thip of the skip rope stops. H doesn't look around, knowing if he does, he'll only end up fatally distracted.

This denial of vigilance leads proves unwise. The skip rope falls around his midsection like a loose lasso and tugs him back from his waiting trousers. He turns and the rope is replaced by arms. Alfie crowds him against the mattress. All his hard-won feet of distance falling back to zero.

“Now where do you think you're going?” Alfie says, helping himself to a healthy handful of buttock. He bends his head and presses a lazy kiss to Tommy's throat.

“It's past three,” says Tommy. “I have to be heading back.”

He makes a disagreeing noise. “You ain't eaten all day.”

“Who's fault is that?” he said pointedly, steeling himself.

“So let me feed you supper,” comes the easy reply.

“You have training to do, said so yourself.”

“What – this? This is just distraction, a way to spend some time between my bouts with you.” And Tommy would roll his eyes at this, at Alfie's insurmountable ego and inflated valuation of his own stamina – but he can feel for himself the man thickening between his legs.

And then Alfie adds carelessly, “Besides, I'm due in the gym tomorrow, that's where the real training takes place.”

Tommy drops his eyes away, concealing his thoughts. He needs to be at that gym tomorrow – that's why he's up here, after all. The real reason, the only one worth defending. Which means he'll need to spend another night.

Alfie breaches him with a blunt finger and he closes his eyes entirely. His breath hitches – a little from the pain, more from the wanting.

“What's for supper?” he asks, opening his eyes.

  
  


IV.

“That surely was something,” Cutter says, folding his arms and leaning back against the corner he's stuck himself in. He nods, cocks his jaw, and spits. “Something, alright,” he says again, real low.

Alfie wipes his face with a damp towel; it comes away streaked bright red, a familiar enough colour. “Howard, way you've been muttering mutinously to yourself for the past ten minutes, I'm likely to forget I'm the one with the busted nose.” He pauses. “Then you light up one of those foul cigarettes, my nose starts stinging, and I remember.”

“Don't know why you mentioning my cigarettes, seeing as you came in this morning reeking of them.”

Alfie's shoulder lifts and falls easy. He thinks about cracking something about the bad habits of the girl in his bed, but it's a joke only he'd get to laugh at – and anyway, he'd feel somewhat abashed casting aspersions on the manhood he's availed himself of with great enjoyment.

When he next glances at Cutter, the man is looking at him in amazement.

“What's with you, Alfie?” he says, kicking off the wall. “You come in here this morning with that idiot grin on your face, you _lose_ the fight – ”

“Fights are lost, that's how this business goes sometimes,” he says. He's feeling pretty philosophical about it. Could be because he knows he's close to having the money to start his other line of business. It could also be from the floaty feeling he's got going on inside his head; he blocked a punch meant for his right and took its brother upside the jaw, staggered headfirst into a pylon with almost as much force as the punch would've been itself. He might still have a faint ringing in his ears.

“Some fights are lost,” Cutter says slowly, “when the plan is to lose them.” He smacks one hand into the open palm of the other. “We had no such plan today, Alfie.”

The volume of his voice ticks up near the end, and the strident sound of it invades his head. He balls up his bloody towel and chucks it at Cutter, who ducks.

“You know the rules, mate – you taught me them,” says Alfie. He counts them off on his fingers. “Never act like a customer, never place a bet you can't afford to lose, not if you don't have the results locked in. I'm not a bleeding psychic, I didn't know he had that left hook. You want more reliable results, you got to invest in intelligence.”

Cutter scowls. “Don't give me advice, Alfie. It makes me want to hit you, and I don't want to wind up trying to explain my broken jaw to the trouble and strife back home.”

“Wouldn't break your jaw, Howard. I'd smash up a rib – something nice and discreet.”

He pushes away from the sink with a grunt and reaches for his coat. Cutter's not done, and he stands over Alfie as he bends and laces up his boots.

“Look, is this about the other thing?” he asks, voice lowered. “That damn _bakery_ of yours? Because I said I'd let you go, didn't I? Didn't I say that? Alfie, Alfie, Alfie. All I ask is that you not be a useless berk in the ring in the meantime, yeah?”

Alfie straightens up, and it's only practice that lets him keep the grimace of pain from his face. The dodgy fuck in the ring had taken a cheap shot while Alfie was doing his two-step with the pylon, and his own ribs might be a little smashed, actually.

“Look, Howard – you make whatever arrangements you need for the next fight, and I'll follow along, alright?”

Cutter steps back, looking mighty resigned for a man who's just been given permission to start wheeling and cheating to his black heart's content. He starts towards the door and pauses. “Be seeing you at the pub later?”

“Nah, mate,” says Alfie, standing to go. “Got to be heading home.”

“To your... pack of cigarettes, right.” Cutter shakes his head. “Never thought I'd see the day where Alfie Solomons got hisself hen-picked.”

“And you still haven't.” Alfie sets his pistol in his belt, claps Cutter on the shoulder rough enough to jostle him, and lets himself out.

* * *

He's carrying two hot packages of fish and chips in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other as he mounts the stairs to his flat. There'd been no light in the window, but he is still somewhat nonplussed to find the rooms actually empty. It's a full five minutes before he really believes it.

The only sign of Tommy's presence is an abandoned copy of that morning's _Times_, with its headline about a strike breaking in Liverpool fat and black above the fold. Alfie tosses it aside with prejudice and deposits in its place a more appealing newspaper, one a couple days' old and stained with grease and salt.

He pours a drink and opens his dinner.

As he eats, he decides it's probably for the best. Tommy'd been hanging around for the better part of a week, and Alfie wouldn't want to get sick of him yet, not when they're having such a grand time between the sheets (and up against the wall, and over the washbasin, and in the very chair he is sitting in right this moment).

Besides, Tommy's got a big family, don't he, or so it sounds from what little he's been able to get out of him. Not many can afford a wage-earner up and taking a weeklong vacation – not that this has historically stopped men from doing just that. His own father and Tommy's being perfect fucking examples.

Alfie pours another drink. He finishes eating and sits looking around at his walls for a while.

There is no denying his flat feels less engaging that usual. A temporary feeling, sure – the inevitable sulk of expecting a fuck and not getting one. That's all.

After a couple minutes of uncharacteristic and damn awful indecision, he abandons the rest of his bottle and grabs his coat. Howard is likely still at the pub, and they have plenty of planning to do.

  
  


V.

The argument is still hot coals in his chest, the flames banked but ready to catch again at the smallest addition of tinder.

Tommy stalks through the city, past flying sparks and billows of smoke. He sidesteps the horseshit and splashes through potholes in the rutted gravel. Around him Birmingham is a clanging, thundering engine trying to turn over, and he feels very much like nothing but a piece of grit caught in the motor.

His determined walk brings him to the edge of the canal, an effective dead end. He paces along the bank for a few minutes, feeling the anger in every inch of his body and having no way to expel it.

Polly's voice in his head, a memory he'll be sure to revisit over and over: _You're more like your father than I realized._

With a wordless cry of fury, he rips out a loose brick from the shed at his back and chucks it into the canal; his temper desires an answering explosion, but the brick only falls into the water with a deflating _plop. _

A curse punches out between his lips. He rips his cap off, twisting the wool in his hands until he feels the hard reassuring edge of his blade. He crouches down in the dirt and hangs his head and tries to get his breathing under control.

Polly has every right to it, he tells himself. With the days he'd been gone, with no more word than a belated telegram and his returning none the richer than when he'd left – it's understandable she'd be angry.

But that childish, selfish core of him insists he has been unjustly sanctioned. How could she think that of him? it demands. How could she say that – of all the things to fucking say, why would she say _that_?

Almost worse than Polly had been the others. Finn was miserable and unceasing in his wailing. Arthur tried to put on an easy smile; he slung an arm around Tommy's neck and jostled him good-naturedly. But as Arthur remained the only person to expect anything from their absent father, this show of good faith was a cold comfort.

At the table behind Polly, Ada had tried to catch his eye and wordlessly question him. Tommy's been avoiding her since this whole London business began, and for good reason. He knew she could read him better than anyone. When he wouldn't meet her gaze, she'd quit the room, her anger and distress audible in the patter of her tread on the stairs.

And John had sat on the floor in the corner the whole time, smoking one cigarette after another and throwing a ball against the wall like the whole family couldn't see his pallor or the redness of his eyes.

Tommy breathes deep and shuts his eyes, rubbing his face. He's going to allow himself five seconds to think of London, and then he is going to stand up and return home and make another round of apologies. If he can mug someone on the way and come up with some extra coin, all the better.

_One_.

Second to last day, Tommy had abandoned a book he'd borrowed for the morning and wandered over to the sunny spot in the middle of the main room, where Alfie was doing push-ups with his knuckles against the floorboards. Tommy perched on his back, intending to be a bother and inquire after lunch, but Alfie unexpectedly pressed down into another push-up, and Tommy'd toppled onto the floor beside him. Lunch was delayed.

_Two_.

One of the long, endless nights, they were halfway through a bottle of whisky when Alfie stopped heckling long enough to allow Tommy to make his pitch, proselytizing the opportunities and goals of the Second International. The memory goes vague after that, but they were both laughing a great deal. He didn't think Alfie would be joining the Communist cause.

_Three_.

His last night, Alfie wound up the clock on his nightstand. He called Tommy's attention to the time and informed him he wasn't going to stop kissing him for a full hour. And he didn't. Tommy's lips were swollen and numb by the end, and he was drunk with the feeling, with his complete immersion in the –

“Tom?”

He looks up, blinking.

Freddie Thorne stands at the mouth of the same alley that led Tommy to the canal. With his tumbling hair, tattered long coat, and familiar, easy grin, he might just be the most beautiful thing he has seen all day.

He looks puzzled at Tommy crouched on the ground. “Stopped by your place earlier, but they said you'd gone out. I just got back, meself.” He shrugs, expression twisting. “Bastards broke the strike.”

“I saw in the papers, yeah.” Tommy stands quickly, slinging his cap back on his head. “Figured you'd be back sooner or later.”

“Not much else to stick around fucking Liverpool for, is there.” Freddie ambles forward, arms out, and they slap each other's backs. The exchange feels blessedly normal and grounding. Then Freddie cuffs him. “Speaking of, what the hell you been up to, Tommy? The mood in that house was something else. Haven't seen them all like that since – ”

Tommy twitches. “I know, I know.”

“So? What is it, then?”

He digs out his cigarettes. He offers one to Freddie and then lights them both before handing it over. Freddie doesn't press him anymore than that; he has always been a patient man.

Tommy's heart should be racing a clip with what he's thinking about telling him, but instead he finds it slowing for the first time all day. A glorious resumption of cool-headed detachment. A story, after all, is really nothing more than the precursor to a plan. He is sure once it is all put into words, the logical path will stand out.

He won't tell Freddie the whole truth, of course – but then, he doesn't need to; Freddie is the sort of bloke who believes people owe each other something. No need to explain he's been trading suck jobs for Freddie to understand there's a conflict of interest brewing. And maybe together they can talk out his way through it.

Maybe there's a way Tommy can salvage something from this mess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A week or so ago, marsza over on tumblr posted [some thoughts on bi!tommy](https://marsza.tumblr.com/post/189433168755) that made me sit up and go: 1) how the fuck did I forget about Freddie fucking Thorne? and 2) oh, fuck, my _heart._ And lo, Freddie Thorne appears in this fic! (with a convenient excuse for his absence thus far...)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone's staying safe out there <3

I.

“Protection,” says a dubious Victor, turning meditatively in place.

“Protection,” confirms Alfie, and punches him with all the strength coiled in his arm.

Punching Victor's chest is not unlike punching a brick wall. Combine the body of a Sevillan bull with the mind of a child – a slow child, one that was perhaps a little simple to begin with and then got beat about the head a few too many times by a father with a crooked heart – and one might get Victor Sastre. He's six foot seven when he's not ducking his head and has a reach that could rival the Catholic church. But he's got emotional problems and cannot fight in the ring – and if one asks, he has in fact _never_ fought in the ring, and we don't know what you're talking about Inspector, Victor wasn't even in the city the night that poor fellow died.

Howard damn near cried when Victor retired. Even keeping him as a training assistant couldn't assuage his grief, which ran deep and pure.

“Who'm I protecting?” Victor wants to know. His ponderous expression of curiosity does not so much as flinch as Alfie circles him and throws a few more punches, even when two land.

“Oh,” he says between hard breaths, “All kinds. Shopkeepers, barmen, the odd restaurateur. Hard-working people of the world who congregate in this city and keep it running.”

He lunges forward, and Victor absently puts a hand up; Alfie staggers back against the ropes.

“And who'm I protecting 'em _from_?”

Alfie jumps back into position. He rotates his arms a few times, trying to loosen up. His left shoulder has been bothering him for weeks now. Been sleeping on his wrong side, he thinks.

“Al?” Victor asks again, “Who'm I protecting 'em from?”

“Bad people, Victor. Bad people.”

He tries a few jabs and follows with a right cross. All but the cross is blocked, and Victor grunts at the lucky blow.

“Look,” Alfie says, “most likely you won't have to do anything but stand around and look mean. Men will take one look at your ugly mug and those dinner plate fists and decide it's not worth the bother. Everyone goes home with their bits still in the right places, and _we_ go home with lots and lots of _money_.”

“You keep talking about me face. What's wrong with me face?”

Alfie stops pivoting. He looks up at Victor: his wide-set eyes and squashed nose, the burn scar across his left cheek. He smiles sweetly. “Nothing. You're a beautiful man, Victor. No mother would deny you.”

Victor says, “I got a woman, you know.”

Just as well Victor can't tell the difference between a normal smile and a sarcastic one. “Oh, that's grand. Really. A woman? Good for you.”

He gestures with one hand, and Alfie has to lean out of the path of his swing. “She likes me face. And me voice.”

Alfie starts to put his fists back up but pauses. His eyebrows knit. “What, you can _sing_?”

“Alfie. Victor,” Cutter calls as he comes through the door of the gym, “take fifteen, would you? Alfie, you got yourself a... visitor.” He says this last while casting a dark and suspicious look over his shoulder. This is the only warning Alfie gets before Tommy Shelby steps through the door.

It's been three weeks since he saw him. A week of idle daydreaming followed by one of resigned acceptance – and then he heard around the streets that Shelby was asking about him, about his fights and his plans. Gathering intelligence.

He's been expecting this visit for a few days.

“Go ahead, Victor,” he says, not taking his eyes off the boy.

Cutter pulls a face from the door. “Whatever you're thinking – not in my gym, Alfie, yeah?”

He's not sure if Howard thinks he's going to kill Tommy or sodomize him across the ropes. He likes the ambiguity, though, so he waves him off instead of asking for clarification.

Tommy watches Victor pass by. On another man, those raised eyebrows would've meant fear or amazement, but with Tommy they are only assessing. Alfie wonders if he'd fuck Victor too, if the giant was so inclined; if it turned a profit somewhere down the road.

Victor and Cutter let the door swing closed behind them, and then they are alone.

He calls over, when it seems apparent that Tommy isn't going to move, “You're gonna have to come up here, mate. I ain't cooling down just to start up again in fifteen minutes.”

It's all he says. Maybe another day he would've ran commentary as Tommy starts forward and climbs up into the ring, somehow looking nimble and awkward at the same time, his long dark coat by some miracle not getting in the way of his stepping through the ropes. Maybe another day Alfie would've talked him into a corner, would've kept talking until his mouth had something better to do.

But today he thinks he's maybe talked a little too fucking much already, so he waits in the center, slowly practicing his footwork while not taking his eyes off the boy.

Tommy registers the silence. His chin comes up. “Hello, Alfie,” he says.

He raises a hand and waves it slowly, sarcastically. He keeps up his footwork and after a few seconds Tommy is forced to either mirror him or start talking to his back. Like the queerest little roundabout, they slowly turned about the ring. Alfie miming punches; Tommy with his hands resolutely down at his sides. There is some kind of fucking metaphor in that.

“I've come about a fight,” says Tommy, walking backwards.

“Have you now.”

“A rematch.”

Alfie smiles meanly. “All fights are arranged through my man Cutter. Seems like you're dancing with the wrong bloke.”

A muscle ticks in his fine-boned jaw, but Tommy perseveres. “I wanted to bring it to you first. Be above board with it – so there was no misunderstanding or the like.”

He nods like he's thinking and shadowboxes another few seconds, watching Tommy watch his arms.

It is such a damn shame.

“Oh, there ain't any misunderstanding on my end, Tommy,” he says eventually, “but it's real kind of you to think of me in all your plotting.”

Tommy refocuses on his face. His mouth presses thin. “It's only business, Alfie. Nothing personal.”

Only business. He'll have to use that one, he will. Only business, nothing personal. Like Alfie's business isn't pretty fucking personal, being it's his body on the ropes and all.

“Your brother's a lucky man,” he says. “Got a leg up this time, eh, lucky for him his brother's willing to throw one over for the sake of the family. You got it all covered, don't you, Tommy? Corner to corner.”

“You don't know anything about my family. Or me.”

Tommy's frustration is ticking over into anger, which is fucking rich, him being angry with Alfie. Maybe he tells himself it's justified, but Alfie knows the truth. He knows why he's really angry. Alfie smiles at him and thinks: I know how rough your voice is in the first few minutes of the morning. I know you like your nipples played with but can take or leave any ball fondling. I know you like Thackeray but are too dismissive of Trollope.

He stops turning; Tommy follows suit on delay. Maybe he did it on purpose, maybe not, but now they're within arms' reach of each other. Alfie could lay him out or lay one on him. He's got all the choices in the world right in front of him.

“And when would you like your sweet, obedient brother to fight?” he asks.

“Week after next,” says Tommy. He must be thinking along the same lines as Alfie, or at least some of them. His eyes are running over him, and there's definitely heat there, there is. Well, at least the boy isn't whoring himself out against his own inclinations.

“Week after next. You can tell your brother he's got himself a rematch,” confirms Alfie. He pauses. “Will that be all, then?”

Tommy don't seem to hear him, quite. He's watching Alfie's throat, and his color's gone high. Alfie wants nothing more than to pin him to the mat and remind him what he's missing, but he won't play that game. Pride's a vice he can't do without.

“You ever hear the phrase 'forgotten arm', Tommy?” he asks, taking the smallest of steps forward.

His eyes are flat and shiny like a shilling as they come up to meet Alfie's. “No,” he says. “That some kind of boxing term?”

His fist catches him hard on the chin, and Tommy stumbles back against the ropes. He doesn't curl in and he doesn't turn his back – he's got a good instinct for the ring, who knew?

He's probably been hit before, Alfie reasons.

  
  


II.

“It's a question of what we owe each other,” says Freddie.

Tommy blinks out of his reverie. He glances quickly around and reaches up to suck on his cigarette, only to find it's gone out. Miserable damp weather. He crumbles it between his fingers and tosses it to the ground.

“What we owe each other?” he says. “And what do we owe each other, Freddie?”

“That's the question, en't it? What I just said. The capitalists would hold: nothing – each man must make his own way and if he goes to the dogs, he goes to the dogs, and there'll always be another one to take his place on the line. That's what they call our modern society. So civilized, you know. Mothers taking Esau just to feed their kids, but it's all still a _choice_, so it's all right.”

They were hanging out down by the canal, sharing a bottle behind Uncle Charlie's shed. Tommy had wanted to go to the pub, but Freddie's pockets were empty that week, and he didn't like accepting drinks bought by Tommy he didn't think he could buy back anytime soon.

So much for what they owed each other, thought Tommy. He was a little fed up with standing out in the cold mist like they were still fourteen. He turned up the collar of his coat and thrust his hands into his pockets.

He stared down the canal to where it joined with the fog and forest and disappeared altogether. When he was nine and she six, he and Ada would play like there was a whole other world on the other side of that fog. They spent hours looking for a way in. He'd come home muddy and carrying his sister soaked through but their mother, sitting smoking and tired by the stove, never scolded him. She understood. She did her own staring into the trees.

“Tommy?” said Freddie, looking at him with an expression shifting sharply from quizzical to concerned.

He said, belatedly, “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

* * *

The bruise around his eye no longer hurt when the first telegram arrived four days ago: _Sorry about the temper, honeycake._

Tommy was thankful no one had opened it before handing it over. There wasn't much privacy to be had in Small Heath, and the line of what was to be respected floated and swayed depending on the day and who was around. There was nothing in the message Tommy couldn't easily explain away, but he was still glad he would not have to.

The next day, a second telegram: _Thinking about our discussion over that cheeky fuck Ovid_.

It was less incriminating than the first, but the thoughts it called to mind – chiefly, just what he and Alfie had done over the open copy of Ovid Alfie left on his bed – sent Tommy storming to his room as if in a great rage to reply. He brought himself off with a vicious, merciless speed against his closed door, biting the fist holding the crumpled telegram and keeping his eyes shut so he wouldn't have to look around and be reminded of his choice. If anyone noticed he did not leave for the telegraph office at any point for the rest of the day, they did not say anything.

And finally, yesterday's telegram: _I guess you don't owe me nothing._

This was the worst of the lot, for it was confusing. Tommy loathed confusing.

* * *

What's it all for, he wonders often in the quiet moments between the noise and clatter of the day's business. He slips beneath the shouts and ticker tape and enters a private realm of thought that could not be touched by the chaos of Birmingham.

Blood and hay dust: Arthur is in fine form, jumping and shuffling across the pen and grinning between his fists like he knows a secret.

Which he does, Tommy supposes. He leans against the corner post and smokes and watches his brother beat a man who has a stone and half a foot to his advantage. He thinks: may Arthur's long reach always protect him, keep the world those critical extra inches away.

“How's it coming?” inquires Ada, sliding up along the fence.

“Arthur is ready to march south and conquer London,” says Tommy.

“Mm,” she says.

She watches the two grapple in the ring with the clear, unbothered eye of a girl who saw a Kimber boy kick a man to death in the street before she'd lost all her baby teeth. She does not look convinced, precisely. Ada has made clear her opinion on the whole boxing affair.

Over supper the previous night she said: “What does it do for this family, really, Arthur winning a few purses? It won't change our structural problems.”

She has spent entirely too much time talking to Freddie lately, he'd thought. He now looks at her narrowly, like he might catch some hint of an association in her face or manner of dress. But she stubbornly continues to look simply like Ada, his skinny little sister.

He gets an unwelcome confirmation of his suspicions when she turns to him, dismissing the brutal bout happening a few feet away, and says, “Freddie told me you've been acting strange, and I agree. What's wrong with you?”

She reaches into the pocket of his coat and comes away with his cigarettes. He lets her, demanding, “What're you doing, talking to Freddie Thorne?”

Ada pauses with a match out, unstruck, and gives him a narrow, baffled look, even as her face slowly flushes. She says, “What kind of question is that? Do I go asking you what _you_ do with Freddie Thorne?”

“Yes,” he says, impatient. “For years.” But what I do with Freddie and what you'd like to do with him are not the same thing. Once, their desires might have been more similar than he would ever admit this side of Hell.

She lights her cigarette – _his_ cigarette – and shakes the match out. She takes another two for later before returning the cigarettes to his pocket. She doesn't say anything, as if she is waiting for the two spots of colour to fade from her cheeks before continuing. They watch Arthur wet his knuckles with the other man's blood for another minute.

“You remember those two weeks before Polly came by,” says Ada suddenly, “when we knew _he_'d left us but we didn't know if it was forever yet?”

Ada hadn't known if it was forever yet; Tommy and John did. But Arthur was the oldest and in denial, and he kept saying to Ada, the only one who would stand still and listen, _he's coming back, just you wait, Ada-girl, he's coming back and he'll've made good on some bets and we'll cook a goose and make like it's Yule._

“What of it?” asks Tommy.

“I was never worried. And not because I completely believed Arthur, nothing like that – it was more... you all were still there, and you were the ones who mattered.”

His eyes felt itchy, and he narrows them as much as he can without blinking. “Why are you saying this?”

She hunches her shoulders in her thin coat and leans on the ring fence like he's told her a thousand times not to do. “I'm saying, we're all still here, Tommy. Whatever you've got planned, even if it doesn't work out – it's just a plan. Just one plan. It's not what matters. So if you feel like you have to do something you don't want to do – you can drop it. Just don't do it.”

His mouth indents. He shifts on his feet. They only talk like this when something big is happening, and it feels like ten times kind of bad omens that she's chosen to do it now.

Within him are two men: the first reaches for the profit line easily laid out in front of him in a neatly tended path. His mind is often awhirl with ideas to accomplish an end before he's even decided he wants it. The other man wonders if he really wants anything at all. Tommy is accustomed to ignoring the second. His family helped. It was easy not thinking about grander desires with John, Ada, and Finn to mind, and Arthur and Polly to help.

But it's different now. No longer so easy. All those times he had nothing in the world to define himself with but being a good brother, and now he wonders if it was only ignorance that granted him even that belief.

It was easier to turn his back on the quiet fog before he knew what lay on the other side. A deranged part of him wanted to tell her: I found a way through the fog, Ada. It's better than we ever imagined.

He says, “You should better than to think I have only one plan.”

  
  


III.

Ollie's sick, _again_, the same racking dry cough he's had for two months, and Edmund wants to stay home with him about as much as he'd like his face held down in the outhouse pail.

“Not another word,” his mum says when his da disagrees. “ I won't have him here on his own, and Leo's too little to look after him.”

But his da says, “Ned needs to start working. We can't afford to have him loafing about at home. And what's he to do about it, anyway. Lad's got a weak chest.” It sounds final, like everything his da says; like that's the way of things and it can't be changed and maybe it's Ollie's own fault, besides.

Mum flattens her lips and begins to clear the breakfast table. The crockery cracked loud in the sink, a sure sign of her agitation. Edmund's two older brothers exchange looks and make themselves scarce quick. Leo, the youngest, gamely toddles after them, giggling at their haste.

“It's the wretched air here,” she says over her shoulder. “He needs to clear his lungs. Katerina has a cousin who works for a house out in Middlesex. She might be able to take him on in the kitchens.”

Da shakes his head. “Listen to you. No one wants a cough like that about the kitchens.”

“Well, we'll see. He must needs go somewhere – may your hands wither and fall off, you touch that knob, Ned,” she snaps as Edmund reaches for the door. “You're staying in and that's the end of it.”

He stops, sighs, and turns from freedom. He drags his heavy body over to the window.

Watching Ollie makes him angry for reasons he can't explain, and the anger has no where to go; Mum chides him for being moody and Da snaps at him for talking back. It's boring, besides. All his brother does is lie about sniffling and sweating and blinking dumbly at the wall. He used to be more fun. And with him out of commission, the older boys have resumed the old bullying he remembers from when Ollie was too little to bother with. Edmund draws a share of torment due two little brothers, and he can't say he don't blame Ollie at least a little for it.

They all clear out quickly after breakfast: Da and his brothers to the factory, Mum and Leo to the dye shop. The door closes on her last stern look, and then it's just Ollie and him and whatever muffled sounds could be heard through the thin walls of the building.

The day stretches out, slow and eternal like a Shabbat spent praying instead of playing. Ollie sleeps and Edmund reads. Ollie sleeps and Edmund watches the street outside. Ollie sleeps, Ollie sleeps, Ollie sleeps. It's like he's not even there. And if he's not there, Edmund don't understand why he should be.

He dares go into the stairwell after lunch, leaving the door to the flat unlatched so he can hear if his brother wakes up and calls out.

He throws a ball up the stairs, where it smacks against the far wall of the third floor landing and returns to him, arcing high through the dark to smack into his cupped hands. He throws it again and has to jump to catch the ball as it careens off the top step's edge at a strange angle. He throws it again.

The door at the top of the stairs is thrown open, and a hand shoots out to snatch the ball out of the air before it can rebound. Edmund's hands drop guiltily to his sides and he freezes.

Alfie Solomons stands at the top of the stairwell, his powerful figure half in shadow. The light from inside his flat reveals only part of the frown he directs down at Edmund, but part is enough. Edmund's heart starts racing rabbit-fast.

Alfie's been in a right terrible state lately. He favors his shoulder for all to see on the street and snaps at those whose sneers he might once have laughed off. He was rude to Edmund's mum the other day, and they'd all heard of nothing else for hours later; every sound from the flat above would launch her back into listing her grievances against the man, of which there were many. The last time Edmund dared peek out into the stairwell as Alfie was passing, the man had looked at him with a flat, impartial coldness. It was as if he'd become another person entirely, like a thief had broken in and stolen what made Alfie, Alfie.

He'd stopped asking if anyone had been by his door, but Edmund never stopped watching. He watched out for the thief, specially.

“Give me ball back?” asks Edmund, striving to keep a quaver from his voice. He didn't suppose Alfie Solomons would respect any man who was scared of him, so although Edmund was a-scared of no one and nothing else in the whole world, he hid it. He liked Alfie more than he feared him, and wanted badly to be liked back.

“This ball?” Alfie tossed and caught it one-handed. “Man can't carry on a conversation with this banging on out here.” He sounds conversational, almost like his old self, but it was a shallow imitation.

“I won't do it no more,” says Edmund. “Promise.”

A voice called from inside the flat, too quick and low for him to hear the particulars. Alfie doesn't make a reply to the voice, but he says to Edmund, “See that you don't.” He sends the ball sailing down the stairwell and goes back inside his flat, shutting the door hard behind him.

Edmund stands fiddling with his ball for a few moments after, turning it over in his hands. He chews his lip and glances at the open crack of his own door. He supposes he should go back inside and check on Ollie.

Except – except Ollie's probably still sleeping, ain't he? No harm in Edmund creeping up the stairs quick and listening for a while at Alfie's door. Perhaps he can help Alfie if he knows some of what's going on. Intelligence, Alfie would call it. Nothing more valuable in this world.

Edmund slips off his shoes, tucks them behind the door of their flat, and creeps up on the stairwell. He pauses three steps from the top; he has never dared get closer to Alfie's flat than this. But that voice from before speaks once more, and his curiosity spurs him on. He lays himself down along the top steps, aims his ear at the gap between the floor and Alfie's door, and listens.

“ – worrying over nothing, Howard,” says Alfie. Edmund thinks he sounds angry, but it's hard to say for sure; when Alfie gets angry, he usually prefers to hide it. He respects anger about as much as he respects fear.

“Oh! Worrying over nothing, he says. Fight's in three days and every half-blind bum on the street can see you've done your shoulder in.”

“I told you, it's fine.”

The voice went low and a little mean. “What'd you do, Alfie, go looking for some action on the side? Where you been fighting, eh? Pulling fights without your old friend Cutter, thinking you can pocket all the winnings clean and easy? And look where it's got you – unprotected, is what, and fighting in places that ruin your shoulder for the real thing.”

“Don't know what you're talking about, mate. But for that tone, you can go to hell.”

There was a dangerous quality to Alfie's otherwise friendly tone. Edmund has heard it before. He suddenly recalls a flash of a memory he didn't realize he had; that tone, years back and moments before Alfie thrashed a man on the street for raising a hand to his mum.

“You're that desperate to get out the business, is that it?” Alfie says nothing, and the voice continues, “I've told you how you can quit, haven't I. Get you a nice pretty sum to open up that bakery of yours.”

There is a long enough pause that Edmund presses his ear harder to the door, sure he is missing something. His heart is beating fast again, like it understands something his brain don't. He waits, waits to hear Alfie tell the owner of the other voice to go to hell again, or maybe to hear some sign of struggle. Alfie Solomons won't let anyone speak to him in that taunting, coaxing way.

Except Alfie says, “Forego the purse, you mean?”

“Let the gypsy take the purse. After I'm through with my whispers, the wagers will pull in triple its weight, I promise you that. Right now the street don't believe Alfie Solomons takes the fall for no man.” A long pause, and then, uglier: “What you done to your shoulder – this is the smartest play, Alfie.”

“Belief's a powerful thing, ain't it,” says Alfie quietly, and Edmund can't read him anymore. He don't sound like himself at all.

He draws back uncertainly from the door, unsure what he's listening to, or why. He feels oddly ashamed, like how he felt when he once caught his older brother Peter sneaking coin from their mum's coat. Like the witnessing was as bad as the doing, is how it felt.

Inside Alfie's flat, the conversation continues, but Edmund is done listening. He creeps carefully back down the stairs and slips inside their flat. He stands for several minutes, leaning his back against the door and feeling troubled. Eventually he shoves off and crosses the room to check on Ollie.

His little brother sleeps on, face pale but serene, and entirely unbothered by the world and troubles of Alfie Solomons above.

  
  


IV.

He and Shelby have attracted a crowd of almost a thousand, Cutter reckons. All types: the English rubbing elbows and sharing air with the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh; Italians and Slavs, Jew and Gypsy. Bloodsport brings the people of the world together like none other. It's like a fucking World Fair up in this joint.

“Happy to be the face of such a cosmopolitan enterprise,” says Alfie. By the way Cutter grimaces, he don't rightly sound like his heart's in it.

“Fuck's sake, Alfie. Cheer up, will you? You're about to be a rich man.”

Alfie forces his mouth to stretch out into a wide, empty smile and lifts his eyebrows. Cutter decides to let it alone. They head towards the door to the ring; the din of the crowd bleeds in from the cracks.

Cutter pauses, hand on the knob, and looks back at him. “How's your shoulder?” This is the third time he has asked; Alfie stares blankly back at him. “Fine, fine. But if it starts to hurt, make sure you don't let on. We want everyone thinking you're strong going into the eighth. Remember, Alfie: the eighth.”

The eighth is when he is supposed to let himself get knocked down. He didn't need to be told more than once to remember. It's not like a man forgets the exact time he is supposed to offer his pride up for the slaughter.

His manager is unsettled. He has seen Alfie in a hundred bad ways but not a one of them came paired with silence.

“Christ Almighty,” Cutter mutters, and twists the door knob.

The crowd's noise transforms into a wave that would batter back a less weatherized man. Heads turn and they all take him in as he makes his way towards the ring. Sharp, eager eyes running over his form as their sweaty fingers take matching trips over betting slips and pound notes.

He climbs into the ring; Shelby's not out yet, so it's just him. He shrugs out of his shirt and does some warm ups, dancing and shadow boxing in his corner, eyes fixed in the middle distance of his own mind.

“There ain't nobody better than Alfie Solomons,” Cutter is shouting to someone over the noise, ring-side. “He can take the hits, it don't matter. Man don't know how to stop. We expect this to be an easy fight, same's last time. You see their last bout?”

Alfie closes his eyes and turns against it, mimes a couple more punches. Full extension, mate. His shoulder twinges. What of it. Shuffle the feet, move the fucking feet, let's see some air under your soles.

A thought drifts in, bobbing and weaving like it's trying to slip past his defenses: _this is my last fight in a ring._

He opens his eyes to Tommy Shelby.

* * *

The thing about Tommy, right, the thing that he managed to forget while they were having their fun looking and moving and fucking on each other, was that Tommy don't belong to himself.

Oh, he pretends well. You'd never guess if he saw him in a crowd – and Alfie has, that was how he got himself snagged on this particular Brummie bramble; he saw Tommy in a crowd, and he was always alone, wasn't he. Alone's not just a matter of company, it's in how the boy held himself, guarded himself. Alfie never minded about the pack of Shelbys he heard were back in Birmingham. What's Birmingham? Might as well be fucking Denmark for all the relevancy it has on Alfie's life. It was so easy to think they were the same in this respect: that they were both alone in the world.

One would never make such a stupid mistake, seeing Tommy with his brother. How had Alfie forgotten the easy, proprietary hold he kept on Arthur's shoulders? The bend of his neck as he murmured into his ear? That closeness, which had felt so hard-won in Alfie's flat, now displayed for all to see.

It reinforces the thought pressing on Alfie's head: why would Tommy set up this match, if he hadn't always intended to see Alfie go down?

* * *

He doesn't pause in his warm-ups, but he doesn't look away neither. Let the crowd and Arthur think he's trying to intimidate. Let Tommy think whatever the fuck he's going to think, not that he's looked Alfie's way even once.

An unfamiliar feeling has taken hold of Alfie, one he can't shake. And he tries. He tries and he doesn't know why it's not working. Why, why isn't it working? Even his thoughts are arrested, the easy stream of inferences and ideas clogging up, coming out in strained sputters.

It's time for the match to begin. Cutter calls him over; beginning of a fight is the only time the man makes an appearance in his corner. The rest of the time he's a hands-off manager, staying back in the crowd to ply his propaganda and trusting Alfie to take care of the rest. Alfie has always appreciated this division of labour. But now he's sensitive to the altogether different dynamic occurring on the other side of the ring.

“You're lookin' good, you're lookin' fierce,” says Cutter, twisting his torso into the ring to thump him on his ankle. “Just remember – eighth round.”

Arthur is staring him down now, brow forming a straight edge over his eyes like some peaky blade. Alfie lifts a few fingers from his knee and wiggles them in the air, _hello_, and feels a flicker of amusement when the other man flushes. Over Arthur's suddenly rigid shoulders, Tommy pauses.

Alfie sets his teeth, waiting, but Tommy don't look over.

“_Alfie_,” says Cutter, insistent.

“Eighth round, Howard,” Alfie says, eyes not moving from his target, “I heard you.”

* * *

Arthur's improved his defenses, that much is clear. They are both easing into it, testing one another, taking shots that look good for the crowd but don't do much.

For the first time, it occurs to Alfie to wonder if Arthur knows the match is rigged. He circles Alfie with the wariness of a man approaching a wild animal; either he don't know, or he don't trust Alfie to follow through.

The first round rings to an end and Arthur visibly lets a breath out as he returns to his corner. He shakes his head at his brother and says something quick. He looks steadier when he looks across to Alfie. Now they both know he's in it for real, or what passes for real in this roaring carnival show.

The next few rounds, Arthur paces himself. Alfie gets bored real quick with such practicalities. The other man hasn't gone after his bad shoulder, and it's beginning to make him wonder.

He tags him a few hard times to the ribs. Arthur drags him close into a grapple to stop the pummeling.

“Heard you was a fuckin' animal, mate,” Alfie pants, inches from the very same ear Tommy'd dipped his mouth to. “So why you fighting like some mincing Northampton _athlete_—”

Arthur breaks away and delivers a blow to his head that sets Alfie's ears ringing.

The bell follows up with a ring of its own and they return to their corners. Alfie turns his head and spits red; first blood of the match. He doesn't even feel the pain.

“You're doing good, you're doing real good,” says Cutter. He's staying close to the ring. It's distracting. It's like he don't trust Alfie or something. Fucking insulting.

On the other side of the ring, Tommy is giving Arthur a slip of something from a canteen. He's got a hand flat against his chest and is speaking rapidly to him.

Look at me, Alfie thinks.

He twists and bends for his water. While he's down there, he says, “Howard.”

The man pushes in close, practically vibrating with attention. “Yeah? Yeah, you need something?”

“If you don't fuck off and leave me to it, I swear I'm going to knock him out cold in the next round.” He meets his fixer's eyes and lets him take the measure of his sincerity.

Cutter pauses, expression tightening. He shakes his head but is already relenting, hands coming off the ropes, feet preparing to back up and slip away into the crowd. “You're a hard man to root for, you know that, Alfie?”

“Is that what you were doing,” he murmurs, but now no one is close enough to hear it.

He didn't mind being alone. Was this a lie, ignorance, or a framework of self-deception? Had it once been true; had it ever been true?

By the fourth and fifth rounds, something has incalculably changed in the air of the ring. Arthur comes at him with the open, raw emotionality of one fighting for everything. He is fearless, and as vicious as the rumours always promised. Alfie takes a lot of hits, a few to the face, and follows up with battering the other man's ribs some more. Trying to get at that heart.

As they head into the seventh, they are both beginning to slow. Alfie's got a split brow that he keeps having to wipe at, and Arthur's already cock-eyed with the swelling shiner on his left. Their dancing is more of a stagger than a weave now, though their aim hasn't suffered. Moments like this, you put all you have into your fists, and let the rest work itself out.

His vision's down to his opponent, but Alfie can't shake his awareness of the audience, of that one particular set of eyes. He feels a mean thrill of satisfaction with every punch he lands; every punch he takes is a wound that goes beyond the physical. He's fighting two men in this ring, and it makes him burn with fury and hurt.

“Let's make a wager,” he says to Arthur, conspiratorial in the center of the ring where no one else can hear. “You and me.”

Arthur knocks him in the ear; it feels personal. “You talk too fuckin' much,” he spits, stepping back out of the range of Alfie's next fist.

They circle. Grapple and release. They're both barely standing.

Alfie's too aware of the clock, of the round coming to a close and what's supposed to come next. He feels like a cornered fox. Reckless spite rises up within him, unstoppable. Tommy should've fucking looked at him.

“How about,” he says through bloodied teeth, “I win, and I get your brother on his knees in the backroom after this?”

Blank, uncomprehending shock clears Arthur's eyes for a moment. His feet stutter in their steps and he nearly goes down. And then, like air rushing back into place after an explosion – a black, revolted fury.

He roars, wordless, and lunges for Alfie, quicker than he's ever moved before. Feints and gets around him, one arm hooking under his left shoulder, the other coming down like a hammer, unerring – he knew all along, he must've known all along –

“Ain't no Queensberry in Birmingham,” snarls Arthur, and dislocates his shoulder.

* * *

Alfie has never had any concept of personal loyalty and indebtedness – except perhaps towards his mother, poor woman that she was. Helpless to defend herself, helpless to do anything but carry on, and Alfie's made it his business to be anything but helpless since he was a child.

Way he's always figured, you don't owe nobody nothing.

But God, he thinks nonsensically through the blinding pain, blinking up at the lights above the ring: but _God_, does he want someone to.

* * *

He's in his corner before the eighth and his arm's hanging there, useless and in agony. Cutter doesn't put in an appearance because ever so occasionally the man knows what's best for him. Likely he's hanging back there in the crowd, putting on a good concerned face while inside he's doing a merry jig; nobody can say nothing about a fixed fight now, not with his shoulder busted for all to see.

Alfie stares at the drab mat beneath his feet, ignoring all the sounds around him.

It's better this way, probably. This way, he don't have to wonder if he's sending some kind of message to Tommy by throwing the fight, don't have to wonder what that message would be, what he even wants it to be.

“Alfie.”

Tommy is standing at the side of the ring. His side. He looks up between the ropes, blue eyes so pale they're damn near translucent. Alfie blinks at him.

Fucking hell, but he is beautiful.

Maybe it's no surprise, really, that Alfie's got himself in this position. He's always had a secret weakness for the strange and beautiful. He is a wicked man born of a hopeless union. He knows his time on this earth is short, and he's always tried to surround himself with things that remind him that life contains more than scraping and fighting and blunt violence.

Tommy steps closer to the ring, his hand half-reaching like he wants to haul him close. He says rapidly, “Alfie, listen to me—

“It's fine,” he says to him, standing. “Tommy, it's fine, yeah?”

The bell is ringing, it's the eighth round, and Alfie has a job to do. One last job. He turns from that hand that don't seem to know what it wants.

Across the ring, Arthur raises his fists and starts forward. Alfie can't raise both his fists, all he can do is angle his body, shuffle his feet, and let his right arm pull double duty. His head feels floaty and light, and he can't properly see out of one of his eyes. His left side feels like it could be fatal, but that kind of melodrama is for after the fight.

He lets Arthur lead the dance for the first minute, evading all attempts to engage. He can hear the audience register his retreat and accordingly let their displeasure be known. Fuck 'em all.

Arthur's more relaxed now. He thinks he has won, Alfie sees. The anger feels distant. Then Arthur gets tired of waiting and advances, one-two-threefour steps, and maybe he don't know the preordained math of the rounds but he looks determined enough.

It would be so easy to let it happen.

The thought registers and it's not even a conscious decision, what happens next, it's pure instinct: the kind he is as helpless to resist as his mother was her own complicity with the devil. Alfie can't do it. Damn the money and damn Cutter and Tommy. He can't not make himself go for the win.

He dodges Arthur's swing and bring his right hook up with all he's got. It connects at that critical junction of corner jaw and neck. Limp as his left arm is, it has nothing on the way Arthur's body arcs back and collapses to the mat.

Pandemonium in the fight hall.

_And that_, Alfie thinks woozily as all his injuries start up a clamor matched only by the uproar of the crowd, _is the sound of your losing your retirement_.

  
  


V.

It's an exhilarating, vicious thing: being the only man in the hall who knows what he just saw.

Tommy should be nervous. The outcome of the night is far from certain and he has a lot riding on it – everything, everything is riding on it. His nerves should be fired, but they remain cool as ever. The melancholy will be worse later to make up for the calm he is gifted with now. That's how it usually goes. But he puts this from his mind as he makes his way through the thicket of bodies.

It's been too long. He knows it's been too long. Precious minutes have passed since the fight ended and Alfie disappeared, since Tommy hauled Arthur out of the ring and made sure he was conscious again. In that same stretch, the crowd has made no attempt at settling. A scuffle has broken out in one corner, and it is impossible to tell from the nature of the shouts whether people are cheering or trying to stop it.

Tommy feels disconnected from everyone; he barely feels like they are walking through the same world. It's almost a surprise when someone jostles him from the side in a slop-over from the scrum.

He squeezes out of the tight press of bodies and slips down a corridor after Alfie. He listens hard at the door, but no voices come from the room within. He tosses his cigarette to the side and puts his hand on the doorknob—

Something shatters against the door. A bottle. A harsh voice from inside says, “Try coming in here, Howard, and I will shoot you.”

“It's me,” says Tommy, breathing in careful measures against the wood. He doesn't step back from the door. His hand tightens on the knob like a prayer. When Alfie doesn't say or throw anything else, he says, “I'm coming in.”

With a glance over his shoulder to the otherwise empty corridor, he pushes the door open and makes quick work of slipping inside. He leans back, pushing it shut with his shoulder blades, and looks over at Alfie.

Tommy might be more accustomed to seeing Arthur's bruises – his big brother's taken plenty of beatings since before he lost all his baby teeth – but he thinks despite the outcome Alfie looks the worse of the two this night.

He's hunched forward on the bench, one arm loosely hugging his ribs and the other held uselessly at his side. His face is a mass of raw meat, bruises just starting to swell and stretch his cuts. He doesn't look up from his lap, where a small tin cup is perched to catch the blood he spits carefully out. He just won the fight, but the curve of his body sings out like defeat. The sweat shining along his spine must be drying, cooling.

“Have you set that shoulder?” asks Tommy quietly.

A pained hitch to his mouth is all Alfie gives him. Just a slight flash of teeth in his down-turned profile. He says to his cup, “I've popped it back in – what, you here to play nurse, Tommy? Where's your skirt?”

“If I wore one, would you let me check your shoulder and ribs?”

“You would, too, wouldn't you? So long as you're the one conducting the show, you... you'd do anything.”

Tommy doesn't reply; they both know, now, that it's true.

The energy from the ring has long since started to drain from Alfie, and in its place pain is clearly making a bid for supremacy.

“How'd you do this to me?” Alfie asks, more blank than angry. “That's what I can't work out. You got me all – twisted up, and. And how'd you do that?”

Tommy's not a nice man. He's never been more aware of it than now, as some obscene bloom of pleasure starts up in his stomach at the other man's words. He finally pushes away from the door and cautiously approaches the bench.

“You won the fight, Alfie.” Like he's reminding him.

“Yeah.” He nods down at his cup, bitter. “And lost the money. Even with the purse – ” He cuts himself off, mouth working in wordless regret and fury.

He jerks back a little when Tommy crouches down in front of him. Tommy almost shushes him like he would a startled horse. Alfie's one good eye, broken blood vessels making it look wild as it works hard to focus on him. Tommy wants to touch the corner of it, gently. He wants to memorize Alfie's face as it is right now, like it's a canvas he painted in a dream.

He rests his hands on the man's knees, the one place he can be sure isn't hurt. Broadcasting his movements under the other man's burning gaze, he reaches for the drawstring of his shorts.

A slight, pained laugh hitches out his chest. “What's this, my prize?”

“You did win the fight,” he says again. He has flushed slightly, determination warring with faint embarrassment.

“I did, yeah. I did,” says Alfie, looking at him hard. “And damned as that makes me and my future, I suppose I can take some pleasure in knowing I've spoiled any chance of you lot making a quid off my spilled blood.”

Tommy can't tell if Alfie is aware that he's already started to steady with Tommy's hands on him. He lets the smile he's been holding back finally grow across his face. He reaches up to divert a runnel of blood before it can reach Alfie's eye.

“Sorry to disappoint, but that's not precisely true. Alfie, I bet on you.”

He thinks Alfie stops breathing.

“What,” he says, licking his battered lips, “What the fuck are you babbling about?”

Tommy's knees hit the floor, and he kneels up so their faces are on the level. “I fucking put my money on you. Do you understand? All these weeks I spent watching you, looking for that one weakness – and Alfie, I never fucking found it.” He hesitates and then figures, what the hell. “Look, the winnings aren't that great, alright, I mean – you were the favourite, Cutter's good at what he does—”

In another place, another time, Alfie might have hauled him close and they'd bang around the walls of this room, lips furiously locked. In minutes Tommy would find himself face up against a wall and taking Alfie's cock with minimal preparation and whole lot of desperation.

But Alfie's down an arm and likely needs his ribs bandaged. All he does his press their foreheads together.

Tommy reaches shaking hands up and clasps his neck, treasuring the pounding pulse he can feel beneath his palms. His fingers dig into Alfie's sweat-soaked hair. He slips forward just the right amount and presses his mouth lightly to his lips.

He breathes, “Let me take care of you, yeah? Just let me.”

Alfie's good eye flinches but he nods like a man tumbling headlong over a cliff. “...Yeah. Alright, Tommy, yeah—”

Tommy's hands drop from his neck, sliding down along the hot skin of his shoulders, skipping the tender joint, the darkening swell of his ribs. His mouth follows, wanting to taste his wounds, wounds he feels a strange possessive thrill over.

His hands finish working Alfie's shorts open and he bends down to show him how much he wants to be here, always.

Alfie makes a noise and curls over him, his large hands that are stiffening up from the fight awkwardly cradling his head. He smells of sweat and blood and now sex, and the unbalanced proportion of those three things in the air makes something twist low in Tommy's stomach, makes him take Alfie deeper, like he could swallow him down whole.

He feels unhinged. He feels like he could take over London.

Alfie comes quietly, his whole body trembling with exertion. Tommy rests his flushed face against a bare thigh and takes in deep, shuddering breaths. Something is uncoiling within him for the first time in weeks.

“You know, I knew you were scoping me out for another fight all along,” says Alfie above him.

He blinks slowly, drowsily, feeling his lashes drag against the soft skin of his hip. “Then why didn't you kick me out?”

“Figured I was still in control, didn't I. I was the one in the ring. Thought it was still up to me, what happened.” Alfie's blunt thumb presses in hard against Tommy's swollen bottom lip, and he automatically welcomes it into his mouth. Alfie's voice is ruined when he says, “I don't know what to think anymore.”

Reluctant, Tommy straightens up. He knows they can't stay in this room for much longer; Alfie needs to get cleaned up, and Cutter will surely be looking for him, besides. Tommy needs to go back and check on Arthur. The world is still out there, waiting for them both.

He draws back and looks at Alfie. His hands stay on his hips, fingers idly brushing his hot skin. He says, “If you think you can stand having someone at your back for once, I had an idea of what I could do with my winnings. I was thinking I'd like to be an investor.”

“Investor?” Alfie says the word like it's completely foreign to him.

Tommy smiles, a hidden vault of ambition opening behind his sleepy eyes. “A partner.”

The world don't know what's fucking coming.


End file.
